


My Body Is A Cage (But My Mind Holds the Key)

by Sanetwin



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Swan Man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 06:12:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1677713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanetwin/pseuds/Sanetwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helena takes Sarah to a place of screams, but not the one she had expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Body Is A Cage (But My Mind Holds the Key)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm living in an age  
> That calls darkness light  
> Though my language is dead  
> Still the shapes fill my head
> 
> I'm living in an age  
> Whose name I don't know  
> Though the fear keeps me moving  
> Still my heart beats so slow  
> ...  
> My body is a cage  
> We take what we're given  
> Just because you've forgotten  
> That don't mean you're forgiven
> 
> I'm living in an age  
> That screams my name at night  
> But when I get to the doorway  
> There's no one in sight  
> \--Peter Gabriel, My Body is A Cage  
> Have I used this song before as inspiration? I'm not sure, but it is a chilling song.

The place stands in a patch of mud, bordered by a field of overgrown weeds.  A discordant murmur rises from within the budding stalks like whispered voices. I scan the field for a break in the calm but only find a cloud of bugs, black and shapeless, swelling with the noise.

The cellar stands in the center: four wooden walls tied together by rusty nails and a pad lock. They abandoned it years ago and left it standing in the empty field like a scarecrow. Its grim decoration has blistered away under the sun and left a skeleton of splintered wood, a mere effigy of the place I once knew. 

“Cold River,” Sarah says and crosses her arms, “It looks abandoned.”  

They hid their shivering scales in the murky river and slithered downstream on their bellies, cloaked by the dark bodies of fallen leaves. Cowards.

She squints at the shack, turns to me, and asks, “How do you know of this place again?”

Her voice scrapes against her throat like sandpaper, peeling away the pink inner flesh.

“I knew little girl once. She stayed here.”

“Oh,” she murmurs. Fear has nestled at the back of her throat, a tight ball of bristled feathers.

My hand moves to touch the familiar crook of her shoulder, but hovers unseen. A stripe of skin shows from under the upturned collar of her leather jacket. Something inside of me _shivers_.

I remember the pulsing warmth beneath my thumbs as I massaged the truth from her throat.

> Long fingers, as smooth as ivory, splayed over her throat and _tap-tap-tapped_ a rhythm to echo the pulse beneath the skin. _Shh, shh, shh._  
> 
> “Let’s go.”

Weeds cling to my legs with long nestles that grip my jeans like fingers. I tear them from the crumbling soil with every jerking step forward.

My hands retreat into my jacket pockets as a dog’s tail tucks between his legs. Crescent wells of blood and shame form under my digging nails.

Sarah walks a pace behind me and attempts to maintain conversation. She pulls questions from the well of her throat and dumps them mechanically into the air, desperate to stir up the empty space between us.

“Really, another girl? Was she,” she hesitates, and I can almost hear her think: _Don’t say clone_ , “Like us? Did you know her well? Were you friends?”

I don’t dare interrupt her and upset her steady stream of thought (so unlike my own) so I walk ahead and hum in the gaps of silence between her questions.

It leaves her less time to doubt, to regret, keeping me around.  

I saw doubt in her eyes last night as we parked by the side of the road once again, hopelessly lost.

The glass was foggy from her heavy, frustrated sighs, but she smiled when she looked at me. She touched my shoulder with forced care. ‘ _We ought to get to know each other, yeah? Be a real family_.’ She whispered and pinched my shoulder. I wanted to say, ‘ _We already are a real family_ ,’ but couldn’t find the right words; soggy, pungent, and sour were the words in my mind. Spoiled by disagreement, they would make me seem unfaithful. I nodded dutifully instead, and she smiled again. Good girl.

 Near the shed, the mud is deep slush that swallows my feet to the ankle. Half a yard up, the weeds split into a wide path that almost leads to the shed but falls too short. It’s the stain of a forgotten gravesite. I imagine my feet sinking through the muddy dregs to step on the bodies that are surely buried here. I wonder if there are any more since I last visited (when was it?); I wonder if any of the worm-infested bodies could be recognizable; I wonder if Sarah thinks about these things.

I can hear Sarah struggle behind me; her breath comes out in wispy, gray-white plumes and the sound of her heavy, wet footfalls grows steadily distant. Meanwhile, the shed grows larger with every minute, and even more hideous. I have to tilt my head up to see the top of the door frame.

Garden shears easily break the pad lock and the door swings inward slowly with a low groan. Hazy light spills over the four walls, making Sarah’s squinted expression slack with awe as she shuffles a half-step into the room; her soft hands reach in front of her like a blind person, eager to touch, to experience, the life carved into the wood. I don’t ever want to look away from her. She enters the room, and I follow behind.

We diverge to opposite sides of the room, trailing our fingertips symmetrically away from each other. Four shallow grooves run vertically parallel to each other in the wall. My fingers trace the chalky, fragmented remains of a nail embedded in the curves.

> Bloody stubs dug deep into the wall’s indifference, but all that ever broke were her fingers. Every scratch tore more of her nail from her skin until all that remained was the sticky, pink under flesh.

“What happened to the girl?” Sarah asks, fingers trailing over a faded charcoal stick-figure drawing. Her voice is hesitant and soft.

“She died.”

Silence envelops the room like the shadow of a passing cloud.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs after a minute.

Something in my throat constricts and keeps all my words from coming through (what was I going to say?) so I nod my head instead. Behind us, the wooden doors grind against the floor, slowly approaching each other, soon to close. At the back, a small mirror leans against the wall in four pieces.

> She props the shattered pieces against the wall and crouches before the mirror. Fine pieces of gravel stick in her skin, embedding themselves into her kneecaps and the palm of her hands, as she crawls into a laying position. Her face is wide and distorted in the mirror, an unfinished puzzle; a black-beetle eye blinks at her and a fat caterpillar lip wriggles its chapped skin. In between the fragments of glass lay dark space where the rest of her face should be.  She imagines black tar sitting in her skull with skin pulled over like a pie crust, holding the pieces of her face together.

A sharp pinch pulls me from the wall to find Sarah’s hand on my shoulder. Her eyes are glittering stones under the rippling surface of a river. Have I ever seen her without tears? Her feet shuffle along the dirt floor with an air of agitation. The game is over; she’s explored the walls, smelled the excrement, and decided that she doesn’t like what she’s found.

“Where is Duncan?”

My chest pangs with a heavy, sinking feeling (something like fear) as the question bounces off the wooden walls. Heat pools at the back of my eyes, the first warning sign, and then my vision begins to blur.  

> ‘ _Stop crying_ ,’ she whispered with a voice low and smooth, like the side of a blade smeared against her skin. The girl never could manage to stop crying in time. Long fingers, as smooth as ivory, splay over her throat and _tap-tap-tapped_ a rhythm to echo the pulse beneath the skin, ‘ _Shh, shh, shh, it’s okay_.’  Her other hand found the girl’s arm in a burning grip, hot like red metal, and pulled her along. ‘ _Into the shed you go_.’

Bringing her here made sense this morning ( _ought to get to know each other_ ) when I told her to turn from the main road. We followed the dirt path and receded into a place ( _to get to know each other_ ) of ( _be a real family_ ) screams. But now it’s clear what she really meant—Find Swan Man first.

Swan Man never would have set foot here; a place with fingernails stuck in the wall and bodies buried a few feet below the trembling weeds. The soot and grime blanketing every surface would have gummed up his polished shoes. He exists in a space of linoleum floors and blue lights that never flicker or wane.

 Without meaning to, I begin to wander from the wall, with fingertips trailing off like airplanes taking flight, and so avoiding Sarah’s gaze. Her eyes follow me as I wander dreamily from the wooden borders and into the heart of the room. I can hear her thoughts buzzing in my skull like the bugs outside (like whispered voices). Her thoughts are simple and beautiful (no, not simple, never simple); clear is the right word. Her mind is a cloudless sky with a blazing drop of sun (like butter sizzling in a pan) and a flock of birds flying home in a crisp, singular V. Her thoughts follow a straight line like a pulsing vein of electricity (a piece of rebar). ‘ _Why did I bring her with me? Why doesn’t she answer my question? She is just wasting my time_.’

My gaze fixes onto the ceiling where a small, circular hole in the wood lets in a single beam of light. Instinctively, my hands cup the gentle lemon-yellow glow. Light, my first friend.

> There was no way for her to know where it came from. One moment she was in pitch darkness, and the next, without warning, a beam of yellow touched the grimy floor. The light shot through the ceiling in dark yellow, near-orange fingers and flowed into a wispy hairline of gold. Furtively, she would crawl before the light, careful not to frighten it away with her squeezing excitement.  Her eyes took turns looking for its origin.

“She believed God was in the light,” I hear myself say, and start at the sound of my own voice booming in my ears. Suddenly, I am out of breath and dizzy. Have I ever spoken this much before? This day feels like an endless exchange of words. No, that can’t be it (I barely even spoke to her). The world is turning too quickly, churning out seconds like bullets, for where I stand in the center, unanchored to the universe spinning around me.

“What was her name?” Sarah asks in a whisper. Her face is trembling again, half-lit by the beam, with eyes glittering like the night sky; a single bead of salt water trails down her cheek. I close my eyes and inch into the gentle cascade of light, half-expecting warmth to pool over my eyelids, seep into my pores, and fill my hollow bones.  

“She never had one.”

The girl died alone, a dark and unsympathetic creature, in a hole with four wooden walls. The woman crawled out, an endless wave of ache, and stared into the sun. She _did_ have a name; a name of light.

“Helena,” she whispers, “Helena.”

Heat pools at the back of my eyes and my vision begins to blur; this is how it begins—

Sarah’s hot breath falls into the crook of my neck as her arms enclose around me, “ _Shh shh, shh_.”


End file.
